Sinking his critical teeth into 'Dracula'

October 31, 2008|Marc Weingarten | Weingarten is the author of "The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote and the New Journalism Revolution."

After writing nearly 2,000 footnotes for Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes corpus, one might think Leslie Klinger would take a respite. After all, he has a thriving tax law practice in Los Angeles. But when the three volumes of "The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes" received glowing reviews upon their publication beginning in 2004 and wound up selling more than 50,000 copies, Klinger felt emboldened to ask his publisher, W.W. Norton, what his next project might be.

"Norton was taken aback by that," said Klinger, who had edited previous editions of Holmes novels. "I mean, that was a terrible way to start out as a writer -- with a taste of success."

Klinger may be one of the world's leading Sherlockians, but he wanted to stretch a bit. His wife suggested Dracula. After all, Bram Stoker's 1897 novel is arguably the most famous book of the late Victorian era, and Stoker was a contemporary of Doyle's. "Arthur Conan Doyle actually interviewed Stoker for a magazine late in his career," said Klinger, who lives in a house overstuffed with Holmes books in the Malibu hills. "Doyle was a great admirer of 'Dracula.' "

But Klinger wanted to make sure he would be contributing original scholarship about a book that has been studied and deconstructed for more than 100 years. The result is "The New Annotated Dracula," a lavishly illustrated volume overstuffed with arcana that's both authoritative and lightheartedly nit-picking, leavened by Klinger's playful stratagem of treating Stoker's novel of the great vampire as reportage.

For The Record Los Angeles Times Saturday, November 01, 2008 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 58 words Type of Material: Correction Dracula: An article in Friday's Calendar section about The New Annotated Dracula" misquoted its author, Leslie Klinger, as saying that he spent two weeks studying the original "Dracula" manuscript and that Arthur Conan Doyle had interviewed Bram Stoker for a magazine. Klinger had said that he spent two days studying the manuscript and that Stoker had interviewed Doyle.

Bram Stoker, born to a civil servant, was an unlikely candidate for literary immortality. But his association with the great artists and writers of his day was extensive, as he was manager of London's famed Lyceum Theatre. Yet it was only years after his death that "Dracula" came to be recognized as a horror classic.

The Dublin native suffered from unidentified maladies that confined him to bed until age 7, when he swiftly recovered. This "memory of revivification," Klinger writes in the introduction, might have "put its stamp on the narrative."

While at the Lyceum, Stoker began writing stories in his spare time, but nothing much came of them. He began jotting down ideas for "Dracula" while studying for his law degree, but it took him seven years to complete the novel. Ironically, the bestselling of Stoker's books during his lifetime was a two-volume biography of actor Henry Irving, his Lyceum boss. "Stoker was a wannabe writer for a long time," Klinger said. "But most of his books are garbage. 'Dracula' was the one book that he took time with, to which he gave a lot of thought."

Stoker's "Dracula" was not the first vampire novel, but it is, according to Klinger, the best. "There were a number of successful plays, short stories and poems. Also a popular novel called 'Varney the Vampire,' by James Malcolm Rymer," said Klinger. "But it's awfully long and has no lasting value." What's astonishing about Stoker's book is its formal daring. For its narrative armature Stoker uses the journal entries of his character Jonathan Harker, a solicitor who has been summoned to Count Dracula's castle in the Carpathian mountains to assist in a real estate transaction. Stoker also uses correspondence, diary entries and newspaper stories to heighten the frightening verisimilitude of the novel, which becomes an eyewitness account of Dracula's darkly elegant transgressions.

Picking up on Stoker's conceit, Klinger decided to frame his annotations around the idea that Harker's journals were real and that Stoker had been approached by the solicitor to set down the events. Not long after Stoker completed the novel, so claims Klinger in the book, Dracula paid him a visit and made the author amend certain passages in order to promulgate the myth that Dracula had been destroyed along with his castle -- thus giving Dracula cover to search for fresh blood.

Klinger's literary "game," a pastime among Sherlockians, allows him to justify some of the mistakes in the text when checked against the original 550-page manuscript, as well as a subsequent edition abridged by Stoker.

Throughout the book, for example, Dracula's nemesis, Professor Van Helsing, claims that the only way to kill a vampire is by wooden stake. Yet Dracula is stabbed with steel knives. "How to account for that inconsistency?" Klinger asked. "Well, surely Dracula himself changed it, which means he is still alive."

Acquiring some of the source material took some doing. The original "Dracula" manuscript is one of the rarest artifacts of Victoriana. It had been offered at auction, and Klinger tried to find it. A year later, during a reading at a Seattle bookstore, a woman approached him and said, "I'm here to talk to you about Dracula." As it turned out, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen owned it and consented to let Klinger read it, but only under the most stringent conditions. "I spent two weeks with a curator holding my hand. I couldn't be alone with the document," he said.